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James Beard-nominated chef Cory Oppold reflects on his time on the Food Network's 'Chopped'

Cory Oppold
Lauren Gilger/KJZZ
Cory Oppold

The James Beard Wards semifinalists are out, and Arizona is raking them in. Fifteen Arizona chefs and restaurants are on the list this year, bringing some much-deserved love to the culinary world here.

Cory Oppold, chef and partner at the new restaurant Course, a new-ish concept that aims to make fine-dining approachable, grew up on a dairy farm in Illinois and moved to Arizona after high school on a whim. Back then, he wanted to be an architect, he thought the Frank Lloyd Wright influence in the Valley made sense for him.

But as he was working his way through college courses, he had a great meal at Wright’s at the Biltmore and everything changed, saying it opened his eyes to the fact that food could be more than meat and potatoes — it could be art.

Oppold joined The Show in the dining room of his Scottsdale restaurant. And it’s the latest edition of Chef Talk.

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: It’s so interesting to have somebody who wanted to be an architect end up doing the kind of fine dining food that you do, because if you look at pictures of the kind of food that you do, that doesn’t quite surprise me, right? Like it is architectural. Do you see the sort of line there between those things and what you do in your food?

CORY OPPOLD: Oh absolutely. Like my philosophy is always, you know, we’re culinary artists. As a chef, our job is obviously primarily to make the food taste good. But also I feel it’s important to make it look good to have that, you know, those two words coincide of art and food come together. I believe that’s what we should be doing.

GILGER: That’s interesting because now that I've interviewed many chefs for this series, not very many would say that. Like I think a lot of chefs try to either say, you know, oh it’s about the food or it’s about the soul or something else. But to approach it from like a very particularly and it sounds like pointedly artistic point of view is really interesting. What do you like about that? Like what drew your eye to it?

OPPOLD: All those chefs are correct. Like it is about the food, but it’s about so much more as well. Like a lot of these people coming out, you know, they’re coming out to celebrate like a milestone or something in their lives, you know. So I feel that we should give them, you know, the best food we can and the best service we can, the best experience, the, you know, the whole package, the art, the everything. You know, I feel the whole package is important, not just the food.

GILGER: So when you’re conceptualizing a dish, do you think about what’s going to look like almost as much as it’s going to taste like?

OPPOLD: Actually yeah, we actually sketch our dishes prior to building them. I mean, about 60% of the time it comes out the way we wanted it to. Sometimes, like a dish will come out completely brown or completely green and we’re like, OK, we didn’t think about that. So we just go back to the drawing board and just like, you know, add this take away this.

GILGER: What comes first, the visual or the taste or the ingredient? What drives it?

OPPOLD: I think it’s usually the ingredient. And then the idea of how to mimic that main ingredient. And then from there from mimicking the main ingredient, then we use I like to call them supporting actors. We put in those supporting actors or fundamental taste that go with that and then kind of conceptualize the whole dish primarily around that. You know, alternating acid salts, creamy, you know, texture elements, stuff like that.

GILGER: Such a the way you’re describing it is such a mix between scientific and artistic. Very architectural, makes sense. That’s like the two things coming together. Give me an example. Is there a dish that you can walk us through that you remember sort of conceptualizing? What do you mean by mimicking the main ingredient?

OPPOLD: I think one of the ones I absolutely loved, it was one of our lobster dishes we had about two years ago. You know, it’s just lobster and fennel is just the primary ingredients. But, you know, we mimicked fennel in different textures, you know, playing around with, you know, different flours or hydrocolloids. Especially one is quinoa flour where it actually enables you to make wire, but it’s fennel. But making it into the fryer it literally snaps like a wire. And it looks like a wire. It’s crazy. But that’s one of those dishes where it’s like we taught ourselves something, a new technique that, you know, we’ve never done before.

GILGER: OK, so you don’t become an architect. You go to culinary school here in Scottsdale, where many, many great chefs have gone. Talk a little bit about that experience and what you learned there. How do you how did you kind of begin this career?

OPPOLD: When I went to the Scottsdale Culinary Institute at the time and then it eventually got bought out by Le Cordon Bleu, when I went there, I never worked in the kitchen ever in my life. I just knew that that’s what I wanted to do. I did very well in school. In fact, I did really well in pastry as well. And actually, the pastry chef that was my teacher, she’s the one that suggested I go work for Ivan Flowers. Her husband, who was the chef, had a different point of view at the time. And he worked under many great chefs and he was very hard to work for. But he’s the one who’s kind of like the father to me at this time of like, OK, this is how you do this. I develop flavors, and he’s also the one that, you know, kind of said, hey, recipes are just recipes are just guidance. You know, you have to, like, look beyond the recipe, beyond the words to find the techniques. And that’s what truly made me understand how to cook.

GILGER: It sounds like so many people in the culinary world had a mentor, like a father figure, a mother figure, somebody who took them under their wing and taught them. This was yours.

OPPOLD: This was mine. Yeah Ivan, and he was like a great background too because he also taught culinary school, which I eventually did as well. Eventually he said, if you ever want to own a restaurant, you know, I suggest you also go teach for a bit. That way you can more efficiently and effectively develop a crew faster. And then I did.

GILGER: That’s interesting. So you went to teach almost to figure out how to run a place.

OPPOLD: Exactly, and when we’re cooking, we’re just, you know, in the mix of the heat, like, we can’t like you’re thinking about what you’re doing, not really thinking. But culinary school itself, you know, in order to teach, you have to learn more. And it actually drove me to, like, see why food actually reacts and actually learn more about my style of food in culinary school teaching than I did in the field.

GILGER: OK, so what is your style? What’s the definition you’ve come up with?

OPPOLD: I think the style is, you know, multiple simplistic items make something complex, not making just one thing taste like one thing because they say scientifically, the human palate gets bored after the third bite. So it’s kind of like, you know, if we alternate like, I'm putting, you know, five components under a simply done on a plate, the guests can mix and match and eat different styles in the way they want, you know, mixing different sauces with this or textures. So that’s kind of my style, I guess.

GILGER: OK, I have to ask about "Chopped," because you won, which is rare and a lot of chefs have been on the show, but not won. But also I wonder about the decisions to do that and to like to go on television. How did you view that? Was it a door opening opportunity? Was it a fun challenge? Was it a one off? 

OPPOLD: Well, actually, they called at that time I was chef at Atlas Bistro, and they actually called the restaurant to see, "Hey, would you like to do 'Chopped?'" And I was like, "OK, yeah." At first I thought it was a prank call. But then they sent me all the information. I’m like, OK, it’s actually real. Went up and did the sign up. Eventually got on. It was, you know, a very challenging experience. I wouldn’t say it was exactly fun. I would almost say it’s more like post-traumatic stress. So it’s like. It's like I'm actually sweating now talking about it, just thinking about it. But, you know, it was great. Definitely gratifying to win. It was a long day though, as I think we got there at 6:30 [a.m.], and I left at 10 at night. But it definitely opened a lot of avenues and a lot of doors for the future.

GILGER: What do you make of that? The sort of Food Network or the social media phenomenon in the culinary world? Is it almost like a necessary evil nowadays?

OPPOLD: It is. And I mean, it’s a good evil. I mean it definitely, you know, especially with the social media and Food Network that it definitely is teaching our public, you know, to become more knowledgeable on the type of foods that we have around us and that, you know, has opened a lot of doors for us for fine dining where we can venture off to do more different ingredients, more different combinations that people are actually willing to try.

GILGER: So there are a few questions in this series that I ask every chef because they always turn up very interestingly. But the first is more technical. Tell us about a dish on this menu that you love and why you love it. 

OPPOLD: I would say our snow dessert, you know, it has banana puree to banana bread, coffee gel to candied walnut. But then it’s the thing that’s completely covered in tempered chocolate. And then we powder chocolate over tapioca maltodextrin which is.

GILGER: What? That was a lot of syllables. 

OPPOLD: Yeah, it’s actually tapioca starch that actually powders fats. So when you melt down the white chocolate and mix it with this tapioca starch, it turns into a white powder. And so we cover the whole dish with this white powder and we just call it snow for our winter menu. So when people, guests, get it, it just looks like a blanket of white snow. But then you crack into it and everything’s down at the bottom of it. So it’s more like a surprise element.

GILGER: That’s really cool. Yes, a little fun with the food itself. OK. All right, so here’s one too that I always think is interesting with chefs. Do you cook at home? Like what’s in your fridge. What do you cook at home?

OPPOLD: Yeah I mean I definitely eggs are always a big thing because it’s quick and easy. It’s healthy. Ham and cheese sandwiches. Quesadillas. The food we eat at home is just like, you know, chicken done really well. Sweet potatoes done really well. Just really simplistic stuff. I don’t go too crazy at home.

GILGER: Keep it for the restaurant. 

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

Lauren Gilger, host of KJZZ's The Show, is an award-winning journalist whose work has impacted communities large and small, exposing injustices and giving a voice to the voiceless and marginalized.
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